It really hasn't been Google's week. First the entire internet exploded because of some uninteresting nonsense regarding social networking (really internet?), but today something happened that's actually a bad thing and worth talking about: in Kenya, Google has been caught accessing the databases of a competing business, and offering Google's own product to the people in the database. Google has already apologised, and is currently investigating the matter.

Assuming the "upper-echelons" at Google knew nothing about this, then I see your point, but that's what happens when you're a big-ass multinational company.

All the interns are probably goody-goody-my-little-pony over at Goog's main HQ, but the same can't be said for staff further from the mothership. "Rogue employees" are everywhere, MS, Apple, Google and they're all trying to make a quick buck. It's the cost of expansion. Sooner or later, the "collective-zaibatsu" mentally dies and the daily salaryman starts worrying about his own ass... human nature.

But at the end of the day, like it or not, the company/corporation should be held responsible regardless. It's their name that was being used in the "scam" and it's the individual(s) they hired that caused it. External forces like the country's corruption index or whether the individual went into debt because of his wife's gambling habits are secondary.

Kind of an unfair generalization here, but imagine if a worker at Bridgestone intentionally let out a malfunctioning tyre, which ends up being the cause of someone's death on the freeway somewhere. Yes, they could track the guy down and even send him to jail, but that doesn't excuse Bridgestone in the least.